The effort includes artificial intelligence, fake social media accounts and a spike in state-sponsored Russian propaganda.
By Dan De Luce
Russia is seeking to exploit America’s divisive debate over Israel’s offensive in Gaza through overt and covert propaganda, with the aim of aggravating political tensions in the U.S. and tarnishing Washington’s global image, according to two sources familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter.
In its ongoing information war against the United States, Russia has shifted its focus in recent months to the Israel-Hamas conflict, seeking to inflame existing divisions in the West and to portray Washington as fueling the violence, the sources said.
…
A favorite theme of Russian information operations is to paint America as a failing democratic state, according to U.S. officials and researchers.
At an event last week in Washington, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said Russia works to denigrate America’s standing in the world, to undermine democratic institutions and processes and to exploit social, political and economic divisions “in our culture and in our society.”
“I think it would be entirely inaccurate to say that the protests that are happening on college campuses, the divisiveness of the debate in Congress and among the public is a result of anything that Russians have done or could do,” [Bret] Schafer [who tracks Russian and other propaganda at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Alliance for Securing Democracy] said. “I think it would all be there regardless of whether there were Russian bots and Russian state media messaging.”
Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a think tank, said reports on propaganda efforts by foreign actors over protest movements needed to be treated with caution.
Allegations of foreign influence “can often be used to delegitimize large and authentic democratic movements in the United States,” Brooking said, adding that some critics of the Black Lives Matter protests tried that tactic citing foreign adversaries’ information operations.
A lot of people on here (and likely the author of the article, who buried it at paragraph 17 and further down after and before a lot of arguing for the contrary) could do with taking that to heart. Both on Gaza and on Biden.
Little bit of A, little bit of B. We shouldn’t think that just because we are fighting for peace and equality that we cannot be infiltrated and manipulated to someone else’s advantage. They’re not mutually exclusive possibilities.
If there would be a clear benefit for doing so, and it can be done in a cost effective manner, then it is reasonable to think it might be happening. When you consider the strong motive provided by being involved in an active war with hundreds of thousands of casualties and many billions being spent, it’s just not something we can afford to ignore.
